Fake Smiles,
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We’ve all seen (or maybe we’ve been) the cashier at the check-out line wearing a fake “customer service” smile and dealing with angry customers, but it turns out that faking emotions for the benefit of others can have a negative impact on our health. Sarah Riforgiate, an associate professor of communication, is wrapping up new research that suggests that the emotional labor that employees perform as part of their job can have physical and physiological effects. But, she added, those effects often disappear if we’re genuinely happy to wear that customer service smile.
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2 • IN FOCUS • October, 2019
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Riforgiate explained her research and implored us all: Please be nice to your cashiers, flight attendants, and waiters so they can respond genuinely. Sarah Riforgiate
First things first: What exactly is emotional labor? A sociologist named Arlie Hochschild founded the theory of emotional labor. The original theory addresses the way in which we work to perform emotionally for the benefit of commerce. Hochschild originally studied airline flight attendants and bill collectors. Airline flight attendants had to communicate that they were friendly, nice and sometimes even had to accept some customer harassment. Bill collectors had to fake crassness and meanness to intimidate people to collect money. Through that study, Hochschild found that when we perform emotions, it takes work. What’s interesting is we often do two types of emotional labor. There’s the first type, called surface acting, where we fake emotions. For example, “I’m pretending to smile and be nice to you. But I don’t feel any affection toward you; I’m just doing my job.” Then there’s the second type, deep-acting, which is when we re-frame the way that we think about an interaction so that we genuinely feel the emotion. At Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, there might be employees faking emotions, but there might also be employees thinking, “This is the greatest job because I’m helping people have this wonderful experience. I want them to be happy so
